A hundred years ago, single men and women married each other for practical reasons. Women, with no hope of becoming educated or having a career, chose men who would be good providers. Men needed someone to take care of the home, cook and bear children to carry on the family name or even work in the family business. To paraphrase the lyrics of Tina Turner, what did love have to do with it? Not much; passionate love and major attraction were not even high on the list of reasons to consider marriage a few generations ago.

These days, it appears that both men and women have become utterly, completely impractical about why they want to marry someone — and it’s quite a turnaround since the days of yore. In fact, a study conducted by Dr. Christine B. Whelan at the University of Pittsburgh and Christie Boxer at the University of Iowa has shown that, since women are now making their own way in the world, there has been a profound shift in the reasons both genders choose to marry someone. The study’s researchers examined how men and women each ranked the importance of 18 different characteristics when choosing a potential spouse (from “irrelevant” to “crucial”) over a 70-year period, allowing them to see how the answers evolved across three different generations of college-aged singles. And my, how our priorities have changed!

For example: in 1977, women ranked a man’s desire to be a dad at #10 in their lists of “must-haves” for husbands. In the aforementioned recent study, it’s moved up to #4 on the list. Why? Because women today want men that will be equally excited about becoming parents and caregivers for any future children they’d be raising together.

Men’s priorities have also changed when it comes to what they’re looking for in a potential wife. You don’t have to be an avid watcher of Mad Men to know that, back in the ‘60s, men were much less interested in a woman’s intellect. In fact, they ranked education and intelligence at #11 on their lists of attractive qualities in women. These days, more enlightened men (perhaps raised by feminists?) rank a woman’s intelligence (#4 on the list) above her good looks (#8) in assessing the most desirable qualities in a wife. How much women value a potential husband’s level of education and intelligence hasn’t really changed — it’s still #5 on the list. A woman’s desire to have a home and raise children now falls to #9 on the list for men, indicating a desire to marry for much different reasons than simply carrying on the family name through their offspring.

“Finally, men are considering more long-lasting traits in women than just good looks!” says Dr. Michelle Gannon, psychologist and co-founder of Marriage Prep 101. “Men are looking for women who are accomplished and interesting, but who will also be supportive and loving.”

Other interesting facts from this study:

Both men and women highly value emotional maturity and dependability, ranking it #3 on the list of desirable traits.

Both sexes ranked “sociability” in their top 10 lists (#6). In decades past this quality was ranked much lower, indicating that we all want a spouse who’ll participate with us actively in our social lives.

Both genders value “good health” in a potential spouse.

Women used to rank “good financial prospect/provider” very highly when considering potential husbands; now it’s fallen to #10 on their list because they expect to co-provide for the household financially.

Women also used to rank “ambition and industriousness” very highly, but now those qualities have fallen to #8 on their list because, again, women these days have ambitions of their own and don’t need to rely so heavily on their husbands.

“Today’s couples want more egalitarian relationships,” says Gannon. “Since many women want to have their own education, a career, marriage and a family, choosing someone who is a good partner, in the truest sense of the word, has never been more important. It is wise for women to choose men who truly aspire to having a home and children, who are emotionally mature and dependable — because high-functioning marriages and families don’t just happen on their own.”

In the “not surprising” category of the study results:

Men currently place an even higher premium on attractiveness than they did during Don Draper’s heyday. In 1956, good looks ranked at #15 on their list of women’s desirable qualities. In 2010, looks have risen to the #8 position — perhaps because we’re bombarded daily with media images of beautiful women? For the ladies, a man’s physical attractiveness didn’t even make it into their top 10 list; “good looks” can be found in the #12 spot when ranking a man’s desirability.

Apparently, women really do love bad boys: Men rank having a “pleasing disposition” higher on their list (#5) than women do (#7), indicating that women are more willing to deal with a spouse whose personality can be somewhat challenging at times.

And now, for the best news gleaned from this survey: both men and women agree that the most important reason to marry someone now is for love. When reviewing their lists, both sexes put “mutual love and attraction” in the #1 spot. If you think this choice seems obvious, consider the same answers from 1939 — when women ranked “love” at #5 on their list of reasons to marry! Nowadays, women don’t need husbands to act as their providers; when they marry, it’s because they’ve found a soul mate. And until recent decades, men placed true love at #4 on their priority list — behind dependability, stability and generally being “nice” (all qualities that one might find in, say, a major appliance).

“In our Marriage Prep 101 workshops, we see that both men and women desire deep, passionate love,” says Gannon. “The trick with today’s marriages is making that love last long-term. We teach people that love is not just a feeling, it’s also an action. Staying in love requires both partners to be intentional and proactive within their relationship. It’s one thing to marry because you found your soul mate; it’s another to make that marriage last through the years.”

Jane Ganahl is author of Naked on the Page: The Misadventures of My Unmarried Midlife,editor of the anthology Single Woman of a Certain Age, journalist of two decades, and codirector of San Francisco’s Litquake literary festival.

]]>351Time, Sex and Money: The First Five Years of Marriagehttps://www.marriageprep101.com/articles/time-sex-and-money-the-first-five-years-of-marriage/
Tue, 26 Jan 2010 18:44:01 +0000http://www.marriageprep101.com/mp101/?p=20A recent study by the Creighton University Center for Marriage and Family suggests that time, sex and money pose the three biggest obstacles to satisfaction in the lives of newly married couples. In its report, “Time, Sex and Money: The First Five Years of Marriage,” the center noted those three topics “were the three problematic issues reported most frequently and with the highest average intensity.” The study found that debt brought into marriage, the couples’ financial situation, balancing job and family, and frequency of sexual relations were of greatest concern to those ages 29 and under. Those age 30 and over shared with their younger cohorts the concerns of balancing job and family and frequency of sexual relations, but also added as problem areas constant bickering and expectations about household tasks.

The U.S. Catholic Conference was one of several organizations lending financial and/or institutional support for the study’s completion. The study is intended to help diocesan marriage preparation programs be more effective in counseling engaged couples about what to expect in married life, according to Gail Risch, one of study’s authors and a member of the marriage and family center of the Jesuit-run university in Omaha, Neb. “Although the early years of marriage involve much that is applicable to marriage in general, there are experiences, needs and issues unique to the first five years,” the study says.

It said the findings are applicable only to educated, white U.S. Catholics, and “not to the entire Catholic population in the United States.” It cited the inability to obtain a sufficient number of replies from Spanish-speaking couples who had taken the personal inventory for engaged couples used in many U.S. dioceses.

The study used a random sample drawn from couples who had completed the FOCCUS inventory and had agreed to participate in future research. A mailing of questionnaires resulted in a total sample of 947 couples, or 1,894 individuals. Out of that a total of 793 individual questionnaires were returned, which the study called a “highly acceptable” response rate of 48.5 percent; 35.7 percent of the returns were completed questionnaires from both spouses.

Other top problematic issues the study showed were, in order, husband’s employment; overall financial situation; expectations about household tasks; constant bickering; communication with spouse; parents or in-laws; and time spent together with spouse.

Communication and conflict resolution formed a cluster of issues the Creighton study identified as appearing regularly among top problematic issues, though they did not make any subgroup’s top-ten lists.

The study said respondents did offer three pieces of advice to married couples: “Communicate, communicate, communicate.” It also found that couples whose parents had never divorced reported debt the newlyweds brought into marriage — especially college debt — as a top issue. The stability of the parents’ marriage, the study reasoned, enabled their children to go to college, for which they incurred debt. Debt issues were much less prevalent for couples where at least one partner’s parents had divorced.

The study showed that more than half the respondents had cohabited with their spouse prior to marriage. It said that on problematic issues, respondents who had cohabited and those who had not were generally similar. While not statistically significant, according to marriage and family center director Michael G. Lawler, a higher percentage of respondents (15.2 percent) who had cohabited “with their spouse and others” said they were “maritally distressed,” compared to respondents who had cohabited only “with their spouse or others” (13.3 percent) or those who had not cohabited at all (13.2 percent). Respondents who did not cohabit prior to marriage had significantly higher average scores than those who did cohabit regarding religious behaviors, personal faith, church attendance and joint religious activities.

One solution toward relieving marital stress and distress the study listed would be to “extend the dual-career family into a tri-career family, establishing the family itself as a third career whose responsibilities and obligations are symmetrical with the other two careers,” the study reported.

Reported by the Catholic News Service, Washington D.C. (Reprinted here under the Fair Use Provision of the US Copyright Law).

We encourage couples to talk about their sex lives with each other, and commit to making their physical relationship be an important way to connect with each other. Research by sex therapist, Dr Barry McCarthy found “When couples are happy enough with their sex life, it only accounts for 15% of how happy they are in their relationship. However, when either person is unhappy with their sex life it can account for 85% of their relationship happiness”

Take this online quiz to learn about your sexual preferences, and then share them in a non judgmental, curious, supportive way.

]]>197Money Talks to Have Before Marriagehttps://www.marriageprep101.com/articles/money-talks-to-have-before-marriage/
Sun, 25 Oct 2009 20:08:59 +0000http://www.marriageprep101.com/mp101/?p=47By Ron Lieber, New York Times

Divorce tends to be emotionally gut-wrenching for the people who go through it (not to mention those around them). But most couples don’t realize that divorce can also be among the most ruinous financial moves anyone can make.

Sure, you could bet big and lose on a single stock or money manager. Or your small business could go bankrupt, taking your life savings with it. But divorce and the costs that often come with it — from legal bills to the sudden need for an additional residence — affect far more people.

The risk that any marriage will end in divorce is about 45 percent, according to David Popenoe, a professor of sociology emeritus at Rutgers University. The chances fall to about 40 percent for first marriages and decline further for college-educated couples, people from intact families and couples who share the same religion.

Given the various financial complications, I’ve long wanted to devote a series of columns to divorce and money. This week, I’ll start with a topic that could save some marriages if more people made it a priority. It’s crucial to air and resolve financial disagreements beforehand.

“It’s almost impossible to be hooked up to somebody who has the same balance of spender and saver as you, or expansiveness versus conservativeness or financial circumstances,” says Gregory A. Kuhlman, a New York City psychologist who runs marriage success training programs with his wife, Patricia Schell Kuhlman.

He adds that the mix gets even more volatile with second marriages, when couples may have children, ingrained financial habits and savings or other assets that necessitate the discussion of a prenuptial agreement. “Success in marriage is only partly attributable to compatibility. It’s about how you manage those differences and whether you have a style for doing so that is successful.”

What follows is a list of four financial issues that ought to be near the top of the discussion list before getting married. Please add to the list in the comments of the online version of this article.

ANCESTRY When Lisa J. B. Peterson started her Boston-based financial planning firm, Lantern Financial, she knew she wanted to focus her practice on young professionals. She quickly realized that many of them could use premarital financial counseling and built a program called Harmoney around their needs.

One of the first things she asks clients about is what she refers to as their financial ancestry. “It’s looking back at your own personal past,” she says. “How did your parents deal with money, how does that impact how you deal with it, and how might that impact the couple’s relationship?”

Because so many of our money behaviors are learned, she asks couples to share their earliest money memories — whether their father hid money from their mother or how either parent fretted over the funds available. This can be a particularly intense discussion for people whose parents were divorced, and the stories are sometimes accompanied by tears. “Money is so emotional, and people forget that,” Ms. Peterson says. “You think that it’s just numbers.”

CREDIT While it’s about the least romantic subject imaginable, your credit history holds a chunk of your permanent financial record. It follows naturally from the ancestry conversation, and Lantern Financial pulls credit reports and scores for its clients.

Molly Milinazzo and Scott Donovan, an engaged couple who live in the Dorchester section of Boston and are both 24 years old, were relieved to discover that their scores were within about 15 points of one another when they went through the Harmoney program in May. “A lot of people end up surprised, and it’s best to keep those kinds of surprises at bay,” Ms. Milinazzo says.

Full disclosure on the credit front is useful for two reasons. First, a credit report is, in part, a catalog of past mistakes and overall habits — loan payments you missed or department store credit cards you didn’t really need. That in itself is a good starting point for a discussion about what you’ve learned (or still need to learn) about handling money.

There’s an immediate practical side to this, too. If there are errors or low credit scores that a couple can improve, there may still be time to make the fixes so that the couple can get the best rates on a loan for their first home a year or two later.

CONTROL Figuring out who will pay the bills each month may not seem to be an important conversation or assignment. But it gets tricky when both people want to take it on. “People understand that in a relationship, money is control,” says Jeff Kostis, a financial planner in Vernon Hills, Ill., who walks engaged couples and newlyweds through a checklist of questions. “If you’re not paying the bills, you don’t know where the money is going, and you feel like ‘He doesn’t want me to go out with my friends’ or ‘She doesn’t want me to play in the fantasy football pool.’ ”

For two people who have both been on their own for a while and don’t want to give up doing the monthly financial chores their own way, Mr. Kostis suggests, at a minimum, regular household meetings complete with Quicken or other spreadsheets so that the person writing the checks can keep the other one up to speed. With more stubborn couples, he might suggest handing the controls back and forth at the beginning of each year.

Mr. Kuhlman, who explains the counseling approach he and his wife take with clients at stayhitched.com, says it shouldn’t be surprising that control issues come up constantly when talking about money. “It’s concrete, you can see it,” he says. “It’s not ephemeral or less measurable, like affection.”

A few things that he suggests couples discuss early on: If one person is making most or all of the money, does that person get to make most or all of the financial decisions? If you’re the car aficionado or have researched all of the local school options for the children, do you get to make the decisions about those things? “These are the kinds of things that don’t come out when you’re dating,” he says.

AFFLUENCE Here’s another question that tends not to come up during courtship: Just how rich do we want to be one day? Mr. Kuhlman refers to this more politely as the “desired level of affluence.” “Are our career paths going to be something that pulls us together? Or, more often, are they things that will tend to pull us apart, where we’ll really have to be proactive to make sure it’s under control?” he says.

Mr. Kostis might put it a bit more bluntly, say to a spouse of an aspiring investment banker or corporate lawyer: Are you O.K. with acting essentially as a single parent, with your partner working 80 hours a week until the age of 80? “Not that there is a right or wrong answer,” he says. “It’s just about understanding, going into the marriage, what that would really mean.”

He adds that people in the financial advice business often joke that they spend half their time talking about money and the other half acting as marriage counselor. “But it’s the same communication style,” he says. “You’re giving people permission to be honest without having someone jump down their throat for giving the answer that they really want to give.”

In the last year of my first marriage, our sex life had gone the way of the dodo. The passion we’d once felt for each other, romantically and sexually, had turned to passionate anger and disillusionment.

Our baby, his job, my writing — all had taken a toll on our quality time. We were so mad at each other all the time, in that pouty, noncommunicative way twentysomethings have of relating, that I could not even bear the idea of sex with him. I was so ashamed of what we, a torrid twosome since senior year in college, had become that I couldn’t even talk to friends about it.

Little did I know that had we gone through this 20 years later, we would have had the satisfaction of knowing we had the social illness du jour: sexless marriage. It would have been the topic of talk shows and magazine cover stories and cocktail parties, and I would not have felt so alone.

Which raises the question: Is there really an epidemic of no-sex relationships? Or has it always been thus, and people are just now feeling comfortable talking about it?

Michelle Gannon, who with her husband, Patrick Gannon, teaches the Marriage Prep 101 class for pre-newlyweds, says it’s most definitely a disheartening trend.

“I just returned from the annual Smart Marriage conference, and the latest studies show that around 20 percent of all marriages are sexless, which means having sex fewer than 10 times a year. I see it in my practice as well.”

Michele Weiner Davis, in her best-selling book, “The Sex-Starved Marriage” (Simon & Schuster, $24), says the problem is “grossly underreported,” which, given the amount of attention the problem has gotten lately, must mean the problem is huge.

There has been a flood of books on the subject in addition to Davis’, including “In the Mood, Again: A Couple’s Guide to Reawakening Sexual Desire” (New Harbinger, $14.95) by Kathleen Cervenka, “Resurrecting Sex: Resolving Sexual Problems and Rejuvenating Your Relationship” (HarperCollins, $24.95) by David Schnarch and James Maddock and “Rekindling Desire: A Step-by-Step Program to Help Low-Sex and No-Sex Marriages” (Brunner-Routledge, $16.95) by Barry and Emily McCarthy.

The market for Viagra continues to boom, as does the new market for women’s libido-enhancing pharmaceuticals and herbal supplements.

If 10 times a year equals sexual starvation, how often does the average married or long-term-coupled person have sex? A 2002 study by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago says married couples report that they have sex 68.5 times a year (presumably that .5 owing to coitus interruptus). (This is of course reported, not observed at bedside, so no one knows whether it’s true and accurate.)

My own theory for the proliferation of talk — and books and products, etc. — on saving/enhancing your sex life has to do with the expectations of my generation, the Baby Boomers. Because we launched the sexual revolution and discovered decades ago that sex can make a fantastic pastime, when we get to That Certain Age, golf just won’t do.

We have assumed all this time that our sex lives will always be robust, married or not. But the realities of life inevitably interrupt the fantasies created in the ’60s. And when they do, it’s a bummer, man.

“Many couples have trouble dealing with the disappointment that it’s not as exciting anymore,” says Michelle Gannon. “Research shows that the first six months of being in love with someone is as effective as an antidepressant. Then it wears off and people think there is something wrong with the relationship.”

Other realities — kids, work, stress — all take their toll. It’s tempting to employ the media’s current title for the syndrome — DINS: Double Income No Sex. But research indicates that sexual burnout is not based on both partners being overworked at the office. Couples with stay-at-home partners experience sexual switch-offs, too.

Physical reasons can include fatigue — cited in studies as the chief culprit — as well as menopause, alcohol problems and other illnesses. And our sexual hard-wiring — our baseline need for sex — can also trip us up.

“It’s amazing how many high-desire folks get together with low-desire,” Gannon laughs. “Life would be so easy if a couple’s desire level matched perfectly, but they rarely do.”

Gannon says emotional reasons are as responsible for sexual dysfunction as physical ones.

“Poor body image and self-esteem issues — not feeling as attractive — are often to blame. Also anger and resentment towards your partner. And complacency. Couples experiencing sexual problems just figure, ‘This happens, so what can you do about it?’ They stop talking about it. They won’t deal with it. And the longer you go, the lower your desire falls.”

Unfortunately, she notes, the consequences are not just a diminished quality of life.

“The upshot can be infidelity. Forty percent of married men and 25 percent of married women are having sex outside their marriages. And that doesn’t even include cyber sex.”

Out of the country’s 56 million married couples — and many long-term gay and lesbian couples — does anyone still have a healthy sex life? Experts seem to be universal in their opinion that although sex is just one part of a happy union, most truly happy couples include it.

The good news, says Gannon, is that no matter how fallow the marital field has become, it can become fertile again. But it takes some work.

“Some couples have deeper issues to settle before they can even think about getting intimate again. You have to communicate more, have romantic time, and you’re going have to just do it,” says Gannon. “Did you know that half the population feels desire and then acts on it, and the other half does not feel desire until they start kissing and touching? It’s a good case for not waiting to be ‘in the mood.’ ” She also encourages her patients to “expand the definition of sex, so that there is more daily affection in the relationship. Touching, hand-holding, kissing.”

My own advice to friends who complain about the lack of sex in their long- term relationships is pretty basic: Examine your priorities. If they say they’re too busy for sex, I suggest they keep track of what they do that makes them too busy. Do they spend hours watching TV or going online? Playing golf on weekends?

Consider scrapping those plans and having sex, I tell them. It’s sweeter to be intimate with a real live person than a computer, and the exercise definitely beats the pants — no pun intended — off golf.

Swing from the chandeliers to perk up old flame
We asked The Chronicle’s Two Cents pool to share some of their views on the lack of sex in long-term relationships. Not surprisingly — this is the Bay Area! — most couples, while admitting that it’s something to constantly guard against, did not view the syndrome as an insurmountable problem. Some stories follow.

Jill — married more than 20 years

I don’t exactly understand this big hoopla over the sexless marriage, although there have been times when it was sexless. But you still stay with it,

and know that it will get better again. You don’t just dump someone whom you’ve loved since you were 17. We get out of ruts by being extremely silly. If it takes swinging on chandeliers to get it going, that’s fine. Once I went to a bar in fishnet tights and let myself be picked up by my husband. Another time we went out to the beach and set up our tent and made love. You have to get creative. Moonlight and roses are wonderful, but you don’t have to have them. Even if it’s just an hour, you have to make time for each other, which is a difficult thing in this world.

Frank — in a gay relationship for 17 years

The passion sort of comes and goes, and varies with our emotional life, things that are going on in our lives. One of the surprises I had in this regard was that one of the peaks was when my mother was dying of cancer. I guess I was thinking a lot about mortality, and I needed to reach out and connect with my other loved ones. We change the routine to get out of our ruts.

Travel is really good for that, as is changing the location, or the time. Our sex life has definitely declined, but when we have it, it’s really, really good. We are very tuned in to each other now. Even though it may not be as frequent, there is a larger emotional content to the physical act.

Michael, together eight years, married three, one child (a baby)

Since the birth of the baby, things have been quite a bit different. We haven’t gotten back the level of intimacy we had before, but we accept it as a couple. It’s not a problem — yet — but we’re definitely looking forward to the pre-baby sexual scenario. We have done a number of things to get through the down time until the baby is old enough — we freed up time during the week as a date night. It’s important to us to keep the romance part of our relationship alive. It all stems from open and honest communication.

Shelley — in a lesbian relationship for two years

I’m very conscious of the whole idea of “lesbian bed death” because it’s happened to me in previous long-term relationships, so we’re trying really hard not fall into that. We think about that a lot. My girlfriend travels a lot for business, so I try to slip some kind of little note in her luggage. I put one in the book she was taking on the plane. We also have this thing we call fund-raising. We have a jar, and every time we have sex we put a dollar in it. We laugh about it. “Oh, a long weekend! There will be some good fund raising!” We try to be playful about it, but at the same time are committed to setting good patterns from the get-go.

Joe — married 20 years, no children

It goes through peaks and valleys, for sure. It’s in a bit of a trough right now, mostly brought on by job stress. It’s hard being with just one person and finding ways to keep it interesting. But there are ways of working on it. The thing that works with us is that, beyond everything else, we are very good friends. We can acknowledge what’s going on and talk about the dynamics.

BJ — with gay partner for 20 years, two grown daughters from former marriage

I am very committed to my partner. But we are not traditionally monogamous. We didn’t begin our live-in arrangement with expectations about monogamy. The first one to three years were vital, passionate, intense. We have found that we are quite receptive to mutual involvement outside the relationship. Inevitably it evolves a mutuality in which the personal dynamic transcends sex per se but does not exclude it. The key for us is trust and communication. And the rule we have is “”no secrets.”

More couples are getting premarital education, perhaps thinking it may give their new marriages divorce protection. And new research suggests they may well be right.

Premarital education “is associated with higher levels of marital satisfaction, lower levels of destructive conflicts and higher levels of interpersonal commitment to spouses,” says the study, published this spring in the Journal of Family Psychology. Based on a random phone survey of 3,344 adults in four states, it says couples who received premarital education had a 31% lower chance of divorce. The number of hours spent in premarital programs ranged from as little as a few hours to 20 hours. The median was eight hours.

Most religious denominations suggest that their engaged couples participate in such programs; Catholicism requires it. But now, others also are giving them a try.

“The reason this has become more important, at least culturally if not religiously, is that people are beginning to try and figure out ways to prevent divorce,” says Deborah Caldwell, managing editor of Beliefnet.com, a multi-faith religion website.

Unlike premarital counseling, which involves the couple alone and may focus on their conflicts and trouble spots, premarital education takes place in a group; classes provide general relationship advice.

Because premarital education aims to lower the risk of divorce and identify problem areas before the wedding, experts suggest couples start such programs six months to a year out.

Scott Stanley, co-founder of a premarital and marital education program and a co-author of the journal study, says increased interest in premarital education follows a cultural trend “to be much more accepting of education as a way to improve one’s ability to do life well.” He is speaking this week at the Smart Marriages Conference in Atlanta.

His study surveyed adults in Arkansas, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas in 2001. Only 7% of those married there during the 1930s and 1940s got premarital education, compared with 44% of those married since 1990.

Apparent benefits were the same across race, income and education, but there was at least one difference.

“It looks like everyone has the same benefit, but they don’t have the same access,” Stanley says.

William Doherty, a professor of family social science at the University ofMinnesota, is among those who want to improve that access. He has created a DVD designed to give prospective brides and grooms a dose of premarital education amid the logistics of their wedding planning. The two-hour mini-course is aimed at managing what Doherty calls the “people stress” of preparing for the big event.

Wedding planning advice abounds, from a plethora of books to websites and chat rooms that let brides-to-be vent about their soon-to-be in-laws or their own family issues. But Doherty says their advice is simplistic.

Marcy Twete, 22, of Minneapolis, and fiancé Matthew Harrington, 23, of New Richmond, Wis., were among a small group invited to attend a preview of Doherty’s DVD session earlier this year.

Their July 29 wedding has prompted her to look at lots of books and wedding websites, but they don’t tell brides much about the background issues related to family dynamics.

“It’s all focused on flowers and pictures and everything else. Nobody takes into consideration what’s going to happen to the family after the wedding is over,” Twete says. “It really is about joining two families.”

]]>24Location, Catering, Flowers…Marriage Prep?https://www.marriageprep101.com/articles/location-catering-flowers-marriage-prep/
Fri, 23 Oct 2009 18:25:47 +0000http://www.marriageprep101.com/mp101/?p=3You’re in the home stretch leading up to your wedding day. Your checklist is nearly complete but you have a nagging sense that there is something you’ve forgotten. You have dreamed of this day your whole life and want nothing left to chance. You search your memory but can’t locate the thought.

Then you recall a suggestion from your wedding officiant. Or was it your friend? They surprised you by commenting that all this planning was for only one day while the marriage was for a lifetime. Then they asked what you were doing to prepare for marriage? You stopped to think but came up with nothing. All of your attention has been focused on the wedding preparations. Before you could explain, they made a suggestion you would never have considered: take a marriage preparation class or schedule some pre-marital counseling sessions. Your initial response was, “Why us? We are SO in love, he is such a wonderful man.” Later on, you asked yourself, “Do we really need this with all that we have going on?”

The short but emphatic answer is YES! If you think about it, marriage preparation just makes good sense–and it certainly can’t hurt! Couples are surprised how much there is to learn about creating a lifelong marriage. Long-time married couples will tell you “strong marriages don’t just happen, they are created!” The simple truth is that even with the best matches, all couples can benefit from learning how to build satisfying, committed marriages. But don’t take it on faith, let the facts explain the reasoning.

The Case for Marriage Preparation

You have probably read the statistics before and know they are not encouraging. Half of all marriages end in divorce. Divorce rates are even higher for second marriages. Half of those who do stay together report lowered marital satisfaction within a few years of marrying. The risk for divorce is greatest in the first five years. Having children often lowers relationship satisfaction. Spending enough time together, establishing a pleasurable sex life and managing shared finances are the major challenges newlywed couples must resolve in the first five years of marriage.

Studies show that getting married is a major life transition and how the marriage is established in the early years shape how the marriage will unfold over the long term. Research has also shown that certain types of marriage preparation programs are particularly effective at preventing divorce, lowering the risk by 30% when couples practice specific relationship skills. The lesson to be drawn from this research is crystal clear: investing in your marital relationship now during the “magic window”–the year before and after marriage–may be the best wedding gift you could ever receive!

But there is another reason to invest in marriage education that is not at all about divorce prevention. Everyone wants the best marriage possible. Today’s couples have especially high expectations for what they want from a marriage. Contrary to popular myth, marrying your soulmate doesn’t necessarily inoculate you against the inevitable pressures of modern life. You want a spouse who can build a shared vision of the future with you, collaborate on raising children, create an open, trusting and accepting partnership that takes into account personal and career goals while offering the nurturance, support and protection of a committed relationship. You also want great communication, great lovemaking and great times–now and forever! Of course, that’s no easy task. Just ask anyone who’s been married for thirty years!

Choosing the Right Program for You

If you are open to doing some marriage preparation, how do you know which program is right for you? The answer has to do with who you are, what your religious practice is, where you are getting married and what is most convenient to your schedule. Fortunately, there are several options to consider. Here is an overview of what the field offers today.

The marriage preparation field is divided into three broad categories: faith-based church programs, private pre-marital counseling services and skill-based classes and workshops. Each have their own strengths and advantages based on their different approaches, the time commitments involved and their costs.

Faith-Based Programs

Faith-based marriage preparation got its start back in the 19th Century when a group of Catholic Spanish wives wanted to help their future husbands prepare for the sacrament of marriage. Engaged Encounter as the Catholic program is called today, has rapidly proliferated around the world. It is presented by a lay husband and wife team who has volunteered to present a marriage curriculum with the help of a priest who may have training in pastoral counseling.

These programs are offered either as a weekend workshop located at a church retreat or over several weekly sessions in the community. Typically, the curriculum involves listening to presentations on various topics of married life, writing thoughts and reactions to sets of questions on selected topics and having discussions with one’s partner to clarify your attitudes, beliefs and concerns about marriage. Anyone getting married in a Catholic Church should check with their priest to determine what they offer and if there is a requirement to attend the program.

Protestant and Jewish religions followed suit and also began offering their own individual programs tailored to the beliefs and traditions of their faiths. However, unlike Engaged Encounter, these offerings can be quite varied, community to community, and depend on the interests and resources of the particular church or religious personnel involved. Sometimes, the program may consist of one or more informal meetings with a pastor or simply reading a book and followed up by a discussion.

Some churches, especially among the Protestant faiths, have “marriage mentors” who volunteer their time to meet with engaged couples to answer questions and discuss issues. In many cases, these mentors will continue to be available to the married couple long after the wedding is over. Faith-based marriage preparation services also may be the right choice for couples on a limited budget since the costs are usually minimal, if not free of charge.

Pre-Marital Counseling

Another option to consider is pre-marital counseling with a mental health professional. Many couples may have particular issues they want to work on and prefer a more customized approach that individual sessions can provide. With individualized therapy, couples can explore in more depth such issues as in-laws, finances, remarriage and differences in backgrounds. Although many therapists provide pre-marital counseling, it is best to select one who is a specialist in couples therapy since they will have more expertise in helping couples. Typically, pre-marital counseling utilizes a three to five session format with one hour meetings scheduled weekly. Private counseling is the most expensive of the options described here. However, if your health insurance covers mental health services, you may even be able to get some reimbursement for the fees.

In some cases, therapists might suggest you and your partner take a relationship questionnaire or inventory to give you information about your relationship strengths and challenge areas. The three pre-marital inventories currently available on the market are Prepare/Enrich (www.lifeinnovations.com), Foccus (used in Engaged Encounter) and Relate (www.relate- institute.org). Prepare and Foccus are only offered through a licensed counselor whereas anyone can take the Relate questionnaire, which is available, online for only $20 per couple. All questionnaires provide a detailed written report about the couple’s communication styles, values, goals and relationship dynamics that can serve as a discussion guide to augment whatever program you decide to pursue.

Skill-based Programs

Within the last ten years, a new breed of non-religious, skill-based marriage preparation classes have begun to be offered. These classes and workshops teach couples the lessons from the latest marriage research studies that emphasize the importance of using particular skills and strategies to promote marital longevity. These studies have yielded an impressive body of knowledge that can easily be taught and applied to couples.

In essence, by teaching couples how to protect their relationship by giving them tools to resolve conflicts that can undermine their love and commitment, couples can safeguard their relationship as they navigate through the challenging early years. Specifically, by listening and communicating better, dealing with personal differences and establishing a “we-ness” while learning how to decrease negative interactions, unreasonable expectations and challenges to marital commitment, couples can create a framework that promotes marital happiness. Having a foundation based on mutual understanding, agreed upon strategies and personal awareness is crucial to making the transition to married life, especially if having children is part of the plan.

Skill-based programs are typically available in the community either in a weekend workshop format or over several weekly sessions. The cost varies depending on what is provided but the typical range is between $300 – $500 per couple. If you happen to reside in certain states like Maryland, Florida, Minnesota or Oklahoma, taking a marriage preparation class can also earn you a discount on your marriage license fee!

Making the Decision

So what’s the next step? Talk with your partner, your parents, your wedding planner or your clergy about whether marriage preparation makes sense for you. Visit the Smart Marriages website (www.smartmarriages.com) on the Internet to get more information and a listing of programs available in your area. And if you are too busy to do anything before the wedding, consider that half of the couples in many of the skill-based programs are newlyweds.

The important thing to remember is that if you want the best marriage possible, it takes some knowledge, effort and skill, like any of the truly important things in life. So start now, during your “magic window” and build the marriage of a lifetime!

]]>3Common Fights of Engaged Coupleshttps://www.marriageprep101.com/articles/common-fights-of-engaged-couples/
Thu, 22 Oct 2009 18:39:17 +0000http://www.marriageprep101.com/mp101/?p=15Following are some typical conflicts that may arise for pre-marital couples as you plan the wedding, make decisions about family involvement in the ceremony, list items for your gift registry, decide on a wedding budget and/or plan to merge finances. Essentially, the time between an engagement and a wedding can be seen as one giant transition where many of the defining issues of who you are and how your relationship will partner on various decisions will emerge and demand to be resolved. All of the following questions and situations can evoke underlying or hidden issues that may yet to be worked out. What may begin as a conflict can end up being an opportunity–if (and that’s a BIG if) you and your partner can address both the specific issue as well as any underlying issue (if necessary) in a calm and mature fashion using particular skills to help you resolve the issue. Listening, asking clarifying questions, speaking clearly and non-defensively, and then working to calmly negotiate a “creative alternative” or compromise solution is a brief framework you can use to resolve the issue and have a productive discussion. Good luck!

1. Family

“His family’s guest list is too long, and they are not even chipping in for the wedding.”

We don’t think we have EVER heard of two families coming up with the same number of invited guests, so this is a most predictable dilemma. The real issue is when the difference is very large and one member of the couple feels concerned their family and friends will be outnumbered. The issue can be further complicated if money is tight or the family who is footing the bill has limited financial means. The first question for the couple to determine is what size of wedding they want and how much do they want to spend? In most cases, the number of invitees will be determined by the size of the wedding budget. So you can work back from those decisions to set a maximum number for the guest list. In a perfect world, the wedding list would be equally divided between both families. But when the wedding site is located near or at the home of one of the families (as if often the case), invariably that family’s guest list is higher due to proximity and other family and community obligations. Talk these issues out in a non-defensive way and see how important they are to each of you. Negotiate, compromise and creatively problem solve to make whatever proportion of guests assigned to each family acceptable for both of you. And always be on the lookout for conflicts like these to be about “hidden issues”. Ask yourself what it means if there is a great disparity between the size of each family’s guest list or the amount of money each family contributes. Are either of you sensitive about issues of fairness or balance? Does one of you have a greater sense of obligation to your parents that the wedding be a certain way?

2. Groom’s Involvement In The Wedding Planning

“He doesn’t even seem to care about the color of the table linens – what is he, insane?”

It is very common for the bride to care more about wedding details than the groom. Some of this has to do with how males and females are socialized. Many women grow up thinking and fantasizing about their wedding day (even career oriented, feminist women). On the other hand, I have met very few men who grew up thinking and dreaming about their wedding day in the same way. So, it is understandable that the bride will probably care more about those wedding details. Find out what details he does care about or have an interest in. Try to engage and involve him in areas that he has an opinion about (ie. food, music, honeymoon destination etc.) and then let him make some important decisions about those areas. Discuss this openly and see if you can parcel out areas of decisionmaking where one of you will take the lead and the other defers. Make sure there are not any underlyng issues (i.e. he feels he should defer to you because “you are the bride–its your day or he feels that your parents or his parents are interfering with the wedding plans). Remember the wedding day is for both of you, even if you as the bride make more of the wedding plans and decisions.

3. Money

“You are spending big bucks on your dress; he wants to go to Bora Bora on the honeymoon.”

Financial issues are the #1 problem that married couples fight about, so it is not surprising that this issue comes up in the planning for a very expensive wedding. In fact, for many couples, the wedding may be the opening bell on the money topic just because it may be the first time you and your fiance are challenged to resolve differences over a high expense item. First, talk about your expectations in terms of what you want your wedding to be and what you are comfortable spending. Do you have a budget? Are you getting any financial help from your parents? Read books together about the typical costs of weddings. Many people are shocked at how expensive the wedding photographer, wedding dress, food and music can be. Share with each other your feelings and priorities in the wedding budget and see if you can come up with a compromise that works well for both of you.

4. Religion

“Why isn’t he making an effort to understand my traditions?”

Weddings are very tradition-bound and this may be the first time your respective family religious beliefs, rituals, expectations and values have emerged in your relationship life. Sometimes weddings force some of the religious and cultural differences between the couple to come up because your parents and your families may be involved (perhaps for the first time) and possibly exerting pressure for certain traditions to be honored. First, discuss all of these issues with your fiance. Don’t expect him to know he should be making an effort to understand your traditions when he may not even know it IS an issue. Identify what traditions are most important to you and share them with him so he knows what they mean to you. Ask him to identify his traditions that he would like included. If the real issue is how much influence one family or the other will have on the choice of traditions, that needs to be dealt with separately. Rather than viewing this as a conflict area, you might think of it as a situation that calls for a deeper understanding of who each of you are in the eyes of your partner. If handled calmly and sensitively, a discussion like this can be an opportunity to get to know yourself and you partner better just by getting clear about what these traditions mean and say about each other. By thinking positive, you can push through to some of the subtle differences that exist between you that may not have had a chance to emerge yet.

5. Aesthetics

“He wants dark green ink on the invitations, but you want pale green. He wants candles on the tables, you think they look silly. What’s going on?”

So…you wanted your fiance to be more interested in the wedding details. Now you have a more involved groom, so a new problem. Both of you need to share the power and decision-making regarding wedding plans. Listen to each other’s thoughts and feelings about the details in an open, nonjudgmental way. Decide on priorities-try having each person rate on a scale of 1-10 the importance of each detail (i.e. he may rate entertainment, food higher. She may rate wedding dress, flowers etc.) If something is really important (i.e. 9 or 10) to one person and not the other, try to assign the responsibility according to importance. Remember it is good practice to learn early on how to prioritize, negotiate and compromise. These skills will come in very handy later on!

6. Territory

“Why does he think we should be married in New Jersey, just because we live here? We need to be in South Carolina, with my family. His relatives can fly in from Ohio.”

The location of the wedding is often determined by how old the members of the couple are and how close or separate they are from their respective families. Typically, for a first-time wedding for the bride (especially if it is a first time wedding for the bride’s family), the bride and her family may want to host the event at a location that is convenient for them. In older couples who have more established lives in their own communities, (and who are often are assuming more responsibility for the cost and planning of the wedding), they may want to make it convenient for their many friends to attend, so they want it near their home. Many other issues could be driving the differences in what each of you want. Identify what the real issue may be before trying to solve it. Disucss why you have the particular preference that you do and then see if you can understand it from your partner’s point of view. After being heard and understood, work toward a compromise that is acceptable for you both. Take into account that you may have different levels of investment in certain outcomes. Try to accommodate what each of you really wants and needs and then negotiate a creative solution to make it happen. If still stuck, think about having a second, smaller reception in the location preferred by the less invested member of the couple.

7. Friends

“He picked for his best man his jerk of a college roommate who is intent only on getting my fiancé drunk at our wedding.”

First of all remember that the issue is not about who the best man is but what you are concerned about in terms of the best man’s influence on your fiance or the wedding itself. That makes the focus for the resolution between you and your partner. First, tell your fiance what your concerns are. Remember that everyone has a right to include the people who are important to them in their wedding ceremony. It has to be fair to both of you. And don’t expect to like all of each other’s friends all the time! But the issue here is probably about accepting some of the differences between you and your partner (in this case your friends) and working to communicate whatever feelings you have about them and what this is really about for you. If necessary, come up with some understandings or even agreements that suggest how you both will handle certain circumstances should they arise. Find ways to accept the diversity of personalities that always comes when two families and sets of friends start getting blended. Try to be flexible, non-judgemental and creative in addressing the issues. If there are particular aspects of the best man’s personality or behavior that are a special cause of concern (for example if the best man has a drinking problem like Sandra Bullock in the movie 28 Days), the groom might address these concerns directly with the best man before the wedding.

8. The Wedding Obsession

“He says, ‘Who is this detail-obsessed, wedding-magazine-reading woman and where is the girl who used to sit with me watching baseball and drinking beer?'”

Both partners have emotional needs here. The bride needs to enjoy this wedding obsession, but it is also a matter of degree. Do they talk about anything else anymore? She also needs to make time for his needs and interests. He probably misses her sharing baseball and beer with him. Many women have more interest and tolerance of wedding details than men do. However, be sure that the wedding focus does not completely overshadow the other aspects of the relationship. Make room for both needs and likely the bride and groom will both be happier.

9. Pre- and Post-Nuptials

“Why is he so intent on planning our divorce when we aren’t even married yet?”

This is a common reaction that people have when one member of the couple suggests signing a pre-nuptial or post-nuptial agreement. To be sure, it’s a sign of the times considering our concerns over the divorce rate, the popularity of community property laws and no-fault divorces as well as the increasing importance of money in our society today. Pre and post-nuptial agreements are most common when there is a large disparity in personal and family assets that each member of the couple brings to the union. Recognise that your respective financial fortunes are also tying the knot when you get married so money issues are likely to emerge at this time if they haven’t already. But, first and foremost, this is usually experienced as an emotional issue between the couple, often involving feelings of trust, commitment and faith in each other and the future of the marriage. And that’s what must be discussed first before any resolution can be agreed upon. The person requesting the pre or post-nuptial will hopefully have communicated his or her reasons for wanting the agreement. The other person will have to get clear what their feelings are and what other issues it might bring up for them. Try communicating all of this to your partner who should make every effort to listen non-defensively and understand the feelings their partner has. Expect this issue to take time to resolve. Keep an eye on communicating clearly and without anger or defensiveness and make a special effort to listen and understand each person’s point of view. Separate out what each person wants from what their families want because this is an area where families may be exerting some influence. If you remain stuck, try seeing a trained counselor who has experience working with pre-marital couples. Don’t let this issue remain unresolved because it can erode the love you have for each other.

10. The Past

“He is good friends with an old girlfriend, and wants her to attend the wedding. I want her dead.”

The ex-partner dilemma is very common and very complicated. Rather than impulsively react or throw an ultimatum at him/her, first try to really hear each other out about what this relationship really means for him and for you. What is this really about for both of you? Listen carefully and sort out the true meaning and then let that guide your reaction. How would you feel if the ex-girlfriend came to the wedding? How would he feel? Now, what if she doesn’t come to the wedding? Absolutely, the primary relationship must be between the bride and the groom. You two need to discuss how involved ex-girlfriends and ex-boyfriends are going to be in your life together. No right or wrong here, you just need to come up with an agreement that works well enough for both of you. If he wants his ex-girlfriend in your lives, maybe a compromise would be to all go out together after the wedding when you are hopefully feeling more secure/less jealous after you are already married!

11. The Bachelor Party:

“Some of his friends are plannning to invite a stripper to his bachelor party and I am horrified they will force him to do something that I will be mad at him for.”

Ah yes, that time-honored tradition of one last fling before a man gives up his reckless ways! This situation is often driven by the friends of the groom and their last hurrah before “losing” him to marriage and the wife’s supposed control over him for the rest of his life. The big question is what does the groom want this rite of passage from singlehood to married life to be about? The groom has every right to communicate with his friends what he is and is not comfortable with in terms of a bachelor celebration. If he wants a racy experience, then he will have to address this with his fiance and determine what that means and what is acceptable in terms of their relationship. Again, resolving this issue may take good communication and patience to hear each other out before deciding what compromise might work for both. In many cases, this may raise concerns about fidelity and commitment to the relationship. If there is an underlying issue, try to identify it first and then describe it clearly with your partner. Whatever you decide, don’t let it eat away at the good feelings you have for each other and what the wedding is supposed to be celebrating. If it does, you haven’t resolved it yet and need more time to get it right.

]]>15Marriage-Bound or Just living together?https://www.marriageprep101.com/articles/marriage-bound-or-just-living-together/
Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:32:08 +0000http://www.marriageprep101.com/mp101/?p=9Cohabitation–the official term for living together- is a hot topic these days in the marriage study field. In early July, researcher Scott Stanley reported that women who are living together with a man and expecting to get married are often disappointed by their partner. It turns out that men who choose to live with a woman first rather than marry her are far less committed to marriage in general and their cohabiting partners in particular than the group of men who commit to marriage without first “testing the relationship out”. This surprising finding, presented at the 2002 Smart Marriages conference in Washington, D.C., to some 1600 marriage educators, researchers and therapists is based on two recently released, nationwide surveys.

Stanley’s findings are consistent with those of another study reported this past June by David Popenoe at the Rutgers Marriage Project that elaborated on the reasons behind the data. He found that men who drift into a marriage as an inevitable next step in a cohabiting arrangement or are responding to pressure from the woman to “make it official” show low commitment to the relationship overall and were both reluctant to get married as well as not as less likely to stay in the marriage over the next 10 years. The new research also shows that among co-habitating couples, 50% marry within five years, 40% break-up and 10% continue living together indefinitely. Considering that the 2000 Census showed that 50-60% of all new marriages involved couples who previously lived together, these findings are stirring up controversy in bedrooms across America.

Reasons Behind the Findings

While these findings are provocative, the authors of the studies are not fully clear about what is driving these changes in attitudes, values and behaviors about marriage. We do know that the national marriage rate (percentage of all individuals getting married) has been falling in recent years as the co-habitation rates have been rising. Couples have also delayed getting married because of extended schooling, a desire to put one’s career first and the need to save for a down payment on a house. Women figure prominently in this new social development due to their desire to delay pregnancy and establish independent lives. Finally, there is no longer any social stigma attached to living together so that couples can consider this option based solely on preference, convenience and other practical realities.

Although cohabitation is not as popular in American as in Europe–where it is clearly seen a viable alternative to marriage- for some Americans it is becoming just that–a more preferred and stable living arrangement. Among those who have been previously divorced, hurt by past marriages or elderly (who have specific financial and custodial arrangements in place), cohabitation appears to be functioning as an alternative to marriage and remarriage. And among the Generation X population, many of whom grew up in divorced families, cohabitation may seem a reasonable next (and extra) step on the commitment continuum from serious dating to engagement. In this way, living together represents a less risky proposition than “taking the leap” that marriage represents for so many.

In our Marriage Prep 101 workshops which is offered to “pre-engaged, engaged and newlywed couples, roughly half of all couples report living together prior to marriage. Some of these couples are taking the workshop to sort out specific relationship issues before going ahead with the formal engagement. Based on our experience and combined with some data from a small, non-scientific survey we have conducted, a number of interesting developments are emerging that may help couples who are living together gain some clarity about their reasons, options and expectations for themselves and their partners.

Sit down with your partner and share your responses to the following five questions. Take turns talking and listening. Try to be clear in your communication and curious rather than defensive in answering.

Which of the four groups listed above do you consider your relationship to fall into? What are your EXPECTATIONS of your living together arrangement? Does living together imply any specific level of commitment or intention to eventually marry?

Where do you now stand in terms of getting engaged?

What issue, if any, is holding you back from becoming formally engaged?

Are there any issues left over from your family of origin that interferes with a deepening commitment between you and partner?

If you and your partner feel stuck, would you be invested in getting help clarifying where you want your relationship to go?

]]>13Myths of Marriage and Divorcehttps://www.marriageprep101.com/articles/myths-of-marriage-and-divorce/
Mon, 19 Oct 2009 18:42:41 +0000http://www.marriageprep101.com/mp101/?p=181. Half of all marriages end in divorce.

That may have been the case several decades ago, but the divorce rate has been dropping since the early 1980s. If today’s divorce rate continues unchanged into the future, the chances that a marriage contracted this year will end in divorce before one partner dies has been estimated to be between 40 and 45 percent.

2. Because people learn from their bad experiences, second marriages tend to be more successful than first marriages.

Although many people who divorce have successful subsequent marriages, the divorce rate of remarriages is in fact higher than that of first marriages.

3. Living together before marriage is a good way to reduce the chances of eventually divorcing.

Many studies have found that those who live together before marriage have a considerably higher chance of eventually divorcing. The reasons for this are not well understood. In part, the type of people who are willing to cohabit may also be those who are more willing to divorce. There is some evidence that the act of cohabitation itself generates attitudes in people that are more conducive to divorce, for example the attitude that relationships are temporary and easily can be ended.

4. Divorce may cause problems for many of the children who are affected by it, but by and large these problems are not long lasting and the children recover relatively quickly.

Divorce increases the risk of interpersonal problems in children. There is evidence, both from small qualitative studies and from large-scale,long-term empirical studies, that many of these problems are long lasting. In fact, they may even become worse in adulthood.

5. Having a child together will help a couple to improve their marital satisfaction and prevent a divorce.

Many studies have shown that the most stressful time in a marriage is after the first child is born. Couples who have a child together have a slightly decreased risk of divorce compared to couples without children, but the decreased risk is far less than it used to be when parents with marital problems were more likely to stay together 3for the sake of the children.25

6 Following divorce, the woman’s standard of living plummets by seventy three percent while that of the man’s improves by forty two percent.

This dramatic inequity, one of the most widely publicized statistics from the social sciences, was later found to be based on a faulty calculation. A reanalysis of the data determined that the woman’s loss was twenty seven percent while the man’s gain was ten percent. Irrespective of the magnitude of the differences, the gender gap is real and seems not to have narrowed much in recent decades.

7. When parents don’t get along, children are better off if their parents divorce than if they stay together.

A recent large-scale, long-term study suggests otherwise. While it found that parents1 marital unhappiness and discord have a broad negative impact on virtually every dimension of their children1s well-being, so does the fact of going through a divorce. In examining the negative impacts on children more closely, the study discovered that it was only the children in very high conflict homes who benefited from the conflict removal that divorce may bring. In lower-conflict marriages that end in divorce‹and the study found that perhaps as many as two thirds of the divorces were of this type‹the situation of the children was made much worse following a divorce. Based on the findings of this study, therefore, except in the minority of high-conflict marriages it is better for the children if their parents stay together and work out their problems than if they divorce.7

8. Because they are more cautious in entering marital relationships and also have a strong determination to avoid the possibility of divorce, children who grow up in a home broken by divorce tend to have as much success in their own marriages as those from intact homes.

Marriages of the children of divorce actually have a much higher rate of divorce than the marriages of children from intact families. A major reason for this, according to a recent study, is that children learn about marital commitment or permanence by observing their parents. In the children of divorce, the sense of commitment to a lifelong marriage has been undermined.

9. Following divorce, the children involved are better off in stepfamilies than in single-parent families.

The evidence suggests that stepfamilies are no improvement over single-parent families, even though typically income levels are higher and there is a father figure in the home. Stepfamilies tend to have their own set of problems, including interpersonal conflicts with new parent figures and a very high risk of family breakup.

10. Being very unhappy at certain points in a marriage is a good sign that the marriage will eventually end in divorce.

All marriages have their ups and downs. Recent research using a large national sample found that eighty six percent of people who were unhappily married in the late 1980s, and stayed with the marriage, indicated when interviewed five years later that they were happier. Indeed, three fifths of the formerly unhappily married couples rated their marriages as either very happy or quite happy.

Additional Myths:

It is usually men who initiate divorce proceedings

Two-thirds of all divorces are initiated by women. One recent study found that many of the reasons for this have to do with the nature of our divorce laws. For example, in most states women have a good chance of receiving custody of their children. Because women more strongly want to keep their children with them, in states where there is a presumption of shared custody with the husband the percentage of women who initiate divorces is much ower. Also, the higher rate of women initiators is probably due to the fact that men are more likely to be “badly behaved.” Husbands, for example, are more likely than wives to have problems with drinking, drug abuse, and infidelity.

Sources

Joshua R. Goldstein, “The Leveling of Divorce in the United States.” Demography 36 (1999): 409-414; Arthur J. Norton and Louisa F. Miller – Marriage, Divorce and Remarriage in the 1990s (Washington, DC: U S. Bureau of the Census, 1992) Robert Schoen and Nicola Standish, “The Retrenchment of Marriage: Results from the Marital Status Life Tables for the United States,

Alfred DeMaris and K. Vaninadha Rao, “Premartial Cohabitation and Marital Instability in the United States:” A Reassessment2 Journal of Marriage and the Family 54 (1992): 178-190; Pamela J. Smock, 3Cohabitation in the United States2 Annual Review of Sociology 26 (2000) [back to text]

Margaret F. Brinig and Douglas A. Allen, “These Boots Are Made For Walking: Why Most Divorce Filers Are Women,” American Law and Economics Review 2-1 (2000): 126-169

]]>18Wedding Planning: Interesting Relationship Challengehttps://www.marriageprep101.com/articles/wedding-planning/
Sun, 18 Oct 2009 18:54:21 +0000http://www.marriageprep101.com/mp101/?p=22You’ve just become engaged and nothing could be more wonderful and exciting. You’re walking on air, imagining the perfect wedding, a celebration of love with your fiancé, family and friends beside you, a day unfolding exactly as you have always fantasized. What bride (and groom) doesn’t begin with grand visions for this special day?

And then comes the planning. Now you have to design this perfection. So you study the magazines, write the lists, talk with your partner about what kind of wedding day you two will share. The possibilities are endlessly thrilling. And endlessly detailed. And at some point, it hits you: Planning your perfect wedding is more complicated and confusing than it seems.

Sound familiar?

As many brides and grooms quickly discover, planning your wedding is seldom a piece of cake. Just listening to all the well-meaning suggestions can overwhelm. Family, friends, wedding industry professionals—everyone has just the right idea, something you must consider. Unspoken preferences, hidden expectations and small differences of opinion suddenly surface. Will the cake be chocolate, the invitations embossed, the tables round? Who to invite and how many? What sort of food, music, post-wedding plans will there be? Few engaged couples realize beforehand that planning a wedding will be their first big relationship challenge.

Ava and Shane are getting married next summer in the San Francisco Bay Area. She’s a web designer and he’s a project manager for a tech company. They both have strong organizational skills, so they chose to plan their wedding together. This, they expected would be a straightforward process. But, like most couples who decide to share the planning, they soon discovered some surprises.

Ava told us “I had always thought that all engaged couples should plan their wedding together. But as I discovered, a fair amount of process takes place between two people planning a wedding. Even though Shane and I had lived together, I never realized how differently we made decisions. The first clash we had was over the photographer. At one point, it got so bad that I felt like saying ‘OK honey, just fork over the cash and I’ll see you at the alter”.

And Ava is hardly the exception.

WEDDING PLANNING IS MORE THAN SIMPLY ORGANIZING A PARTY

As a married couple and as psychologists who provide a secular, skill-based marriage preparation program, in every workshop we have given, we’ve listened to engaged and newlywed couples talk about the challenges of wedding planning. In the midst of the process, brides and grooms often begin to feel uneasy, though the moment of discomfort may come at different points. They might begin to bridle when differences emerge between them or when negotiating among family members or when the simply can’t decide what they want or don’t want. Stress can create conflict between a couple. Since the bride and groom are at the center of the event and every decision swirls around that center, the relationship will take the heat. Many brides and grooms feel this but don’t know how to cope with it and suddenly wedding planning isn’t just planning a party.

Ed and Tine are also getting married next summer at Ed’s family’s summer cottage in Washington State. Ed admitted his range of feelings and attitudes about weddings that stemmed from his being a guy and from hearing wedding horror stories from his male friends. “I was just so overwhelmed by the whole concept of planning a wedding. There’s so much baggage around weddings in our society that it made me want to back off. Traditionally, men like to take charge of planning, but weddings are different. None of my guy friends did much for their weddings. They just let the women do everything. It seems like the guys get the message somehow that all they have to do is show up for the wedding day and play husband. It’s not the right way for it to be but that’s the message guys often get”.

The vital question is how will couples deal with more “real life” issues? Will bride and groom communicate well while under pressure to make decisions and will each honor a different point of view? Will the groom work with the bride or withdraw when his fiancé’s reactions seems disproportionate to the situation? What if the bride’s family wants family traditions to be honored but these run counter to the couple’s desires? How will bride and groom resolve these differences, in a way that protects their bond? In the midst of conflict, how can couples preserve their sense of connection and commitment?

Success in wedding planning is tied to understanding the emotional dynamics involved. Typically (though certainly not always) the bride is more highly invested in the wedding itself than is the groom. Because of long-held gender roles, grooms may actually feel slightly uneasy and may, in response, adopt a hands-off attitude. Other grooms may, in the face of their bride’s concerns, focus on problem solving, rather than listening to what their partners have to say. Remember, wedding planning often relies as much on the interpersonal relationships of those involved—that means on you, your fiancé, your family, their family, and on individual and mutual friends—as it does on professional vendors. This means that you and your partner have the best chance of succeeding if you FIRST create a solid partnership of understanding and only then attempt to navigate through the actual choppy sea of wedding planning.

WEDDING PLANNING IS GOOD PRACTICE FOR MARRIED LIFE

Wedding planning may be the first major task that an engaged couple takes on together. Most couples overlook this simple fact and thus are unprepared for complexities that eventually arise.

“Big ticket” relationship issues about which people feel strongly are involved: Love, honor, money, family, religious traditions, parental expectations, even social status come into play. Beyond that, the wedding day has, for many brides, been touted as the most important day of her life. No wonder couples feel such enormous pressure on the couple to make sure everything is just right.

As Ava told us “I thought I had gotten to know Shane really well over the first four years of our relationship. But ever since the wedding planning was officially kicked off, I’ve come to find out that there are so many differences in how we approach to things. In wedding planning, it’s all about the choices to be made. But the way we come to these choices—the process that occurs between us– has certainly been eye-opening for me”.

Wedding planning should not undermine a couple’s happiness in the months leading up to the big day. This should be a time to cherish and enjoy, and it can be a time for couples to develop their relationships in preparation for marriage. Planning a wedding may be the first chance to couples have to practice being life partners. What a better opportunity to learn how to do this? And what better opportunity to discover just what your relationship issues are?

The wedding planning process spotlights such differences as traditions, expectations, gender role preferences, interpersonal dynamics, and levels of accountabilities. The skills that are needed are the same that the couple will need to create a healthy marriage—to communicate effectively, to maintain reasonable expectations of each other, to share in decision-making and to learn how to set goals together.Once married, couples will be deciding about children, about financials, about where and how to live, about each other’s family’s involvement and dozens of other daily decisions. To have a successful marriage, couples need to learn how to make these decisions together, and wedding planning offers the perfect planning vehicle. Why not start by learning how to do that well?

Seven Steps To Wedding Planning Success

Recognize the Challenge, Embrace the OpportunityBefore you begin to plan, we suggest that you and your fiancé sit down together to talk about the emotions you’re both feeling—those tied to the wedding especially. This is an opportunity. In other words, don’t think of planning the wedding as a mere series of planning details and decisions! Planning a wedding is much more complicated and it really helps for that to be understood before the planning begins.

View your wedding planning as an opportunity to learn how to partner, plan and share decision- making. Remember, your marriage actually begins the day after the wedding, after all the hoopla has receded and you and your partner embark on your married lives together.

Ed describes his feelings about planning a wedding: “I’d like to throw a wedding that is memorable, endearing and intimate. I want people to come away from it knowing us better and having enjoyed the experience they shared with us. But some parts I don’t especially care about—the flowers and the color schemes and the particulars about the food. I may be more involved than the average guy but I certainly don’t see myself running the whole operation.”

Because many big-ticket items are involved in planning a wedding, you’ll have many chances to learn new things about your partner and about how each of you approach complicated tasks. This is your opportunity to practice communication, conflict resolution and committing to a shared relationship.

Explore Your Personal Wedding VisionsThis step is fun. You’ll start by simply recalling whatever you might have envisioned your wedding being when you were a child. Admittedly, more women have thought about their future weddings than have men. But almost everyone can remember weddings they attended when they were kids. What do you recall? Did you have fun? What made the event special or meaningful?

If you didn’t think much about your own wedding, why not? For many, childhood memories of marriage and weddings are shadowed by memories of their parents’ marriage. Ava admitted that this was true for her: “I never grew up with a vision for what my wedding would be like because, until college, I wasn’t sure I would even get married. I definitely wanted a family and I wanted to live with someone but marriage wasn’t part of the picture because my parents never had a good marriage. But that changed in college when I met someone who I thought would make a wonderful husband and father.”

Ava isn’t alone.

Share your visions and memories with your fiancé, whatever they may be. Then switch roles and listen to your partner’s visions. Ask clarifying questions to help you sense more clearly what made an impression on your partner—was it the food that stood out? The clothing, jewelry, music, vows, family spats? Try to identify the core features you liked and might want to recreate from weddings you have attended in your life. Let the excitement of creating a shared vision build with each discussion you and your partner share. Now, narrow in on your own wedding. Focus in on what it is you are seeking to express–your core values, both individually and as a couple, and what you are hoping to celebrate with your wedding. Create a theme or two, like celebrating your love for each other in the great outdoors or the hidden qualities that you cherish about each other. How can you convey that theme in the ceremony, in the location, in the music or time of day or clothing? Stay open to the innumerable possibilities. As you talk, move toward more specific questions about your partner’s vision and descriptions of your own. What kind of environment would you like? Indoors or outdoors? Do you envision a nighttime wedding or one in daylight? Will your wedding be large or small and intimate?

In your earliest discussions, simply try to get a feel for what your own preferences are and a notion of those of your partner’s. Be patient with this first step. Allow adequate time to reflect on the many ideas that emerge.

Once you have a sea of possibilities before you, look at the matches between your own preferences and your fiancé’s. How important are each of your preferences—what sort of weight would you give each? A unified vision will begin to coalesce, synthesizing your desires.

Don’t stop talking with each other, and let your vision ferment while your spend time reading up on various possibilities, talking to friends who are married, dreaming and remembering.You have completed this step when you and your partner have, together, devised a general idea of the type of wedding you would like to have.

Plan the Planning Process FirstThis is the most important step in our approach to wedding planning. Unfortunately, this is also the step that most couples forget. Remember this: planning a wedding takes time and effort and like any challenge, the way you meet the challenge requires planning too. Do this step first before you are drowning in the details.

Now and then couples will ask why bother with this step (that is, those who don’t simply forget). The answer is simple. If you take to heart our earlier suggestion to look at the planning as an opportunity to practice relationship skills, planning the way you will undertake this project rather than simply plunging into the process makes perfect sense. We want you to be conscious of HOW you are doing this as well as WHAT you are doing, especially since your wedding is a celebration of your union.

So what happens if you and your partner have different expectations about who will do what? What if job stress or other distractions interfere with one person’s ability to follow through on the planning process? By first discussing how you will collaborate on your wedding planning, you will establish a framework of expectations, decision-making and action based on practical realities of who you are and what you in fact are able to do. Thinking ahead of the curve will reduce misunderstandings and disappointments down the road.

Ava and Shane decided early on to wait at least one year between their engagement and wedding: “I knew we would hit some friction points over wedding planning so we decided to start the process very early”, said Shane. “And I really like to have some leisure time in the process”, Ava added, “so that I can actually enjoy it. We didn’t want to let any pressure build up because it increases the chance that unresolved conflicts might come between us”.

Wise couple.

Like Ava and Shane, you’ll want first to ask each other how much control you each want over the wedding decision-making. Most couples assume they will share equally, but in reality, one person usually assumes more control.

Don’t Assume Anything!

Talk to each other and understand clearly what each of you would prefer—do you want to address all the invitations? Would you like to choose the flowers on your own? Do you know exactly who should be the photographer? Together reach an agreement at this juncture, an agreement that suits your needs as a couple and each of your individual needs.

Many partnership models for planning a wedding exist but most couples are not aware of them and fewer still decide first on a model before initiating the actual planning. And so we have provided five different models; one of these (or some combination of more than one) may work for you, but make sure you feel comfortable with the model you select, and make sure you discuss each of the options before deciding.

TRADITIONAL: The bride (and perhaps her mother) takes on most of the planning and decision- making while the groom is happy (or not) assuming a secondary role. Couples who marry in the bride’s hometown (with the wedding paid for by the bride’s parents) most often utilize this model.

ASYMMETRICAL: Either the bride or the groom agree to take on the majority of the planning and decision-making for specific reasons (often related to one or another person’s other commitments— work, ailing parent, and so forth). The person taking on fewer responsibilities may be assigned specific tasks based on particular areas of expertise.

EGALITARIAN: The bride and the groom share equally in the planning and decision-making. Each has their own “to do” lists and they share decision-making as well. A bargaining discussion results in the assignment of specific tasks, and these are usually based on each individual’s interests and/or expertise. (If your groom-to-be’s mom is a florist, for instance, guess who’ll do the flower arrangements?)

PROFESSIONAL: If both the bride and groom are exceptionally busy (jobs, children, parents, volunteer work, illness), a wedding coordinator is hired to handle the majority of wedding planning tasks; he or she will organize the wedding based on detailed discussions with the couple. These folks are experts, remember, and most couples agree to the counsel offered.

CORPORATE: Similar to the asymmetrical model, in the corporate model one person does most of the research but both bride and groom share equally the decision-making. One person gathers information, opinions, photos, ideas, and presents these for discussion and share decision-making in regularly scheduled “conferences”.

Discuss which of the above options (or combinations thereof) makes both of your most comfortable. Now, imagine out loud, the ways in which whatever model you have selected will work in relationship with your vision.

Ed and Tine decided to employ the “asymmetrical” model because Ed was committed to a full time job and Tine had some available time coming up in her work schedule as a project manager at a public relations firm. “I like to start out with a timeline to create a schedule for Ed and me that will allow us each to do the things we know best. Then I will write up a list of my ideas—what we call a creative brief in my profession—that will give a plan for moving forward with our choices. Our wedding will be pretty casual so I won’t have a lot to figure out. Some of the tasks can be delayed for a few months. Certain items will be delegated to Ed who likes negotiation. I will have my checklist and information about suppliers and due dates. My job will be to oversee the planning and then frame decisions for Ed and me to decide about it.

Again, a wise couple.

Create Your Action PlanThis is where most couples begin when planning their wedding. The action plan is an obvious step because it is concrete, and many are good at this step because it is involves specific and necessary actions.

First, define all the tasks involved with creating your wedding vision. Create a to-do list. Set a budget. Decide about who will be making calls to vendors, gathering information, comparing services and prices and calling references. Assign responsibilities for making decisions and dealing with contracts.

Tine and Ed were quick to point to the biggest item on their action plan: deciding about location and size of the guest list: “I have a small family whereas Ed has an enormous family–over 200 people all living in the Pacific Northwest. It really feels like I’m marrying into this big family,” Tine began.

Ed picked up the story. “Family is real important to me and I wanted to find a way to make it convenient for as many of my extended family to attend the wedding as I could. And that is what drove the decision to have the wedding at my family’s summer cabin in the Northwest. This cabin has been in my family for generations. It’s the center of my family’s life and it just made so much sense to have it there.”

“I knew his family’s sense of history around this cabin,” Tine added, “and how wonderful it would be to all the family to gather at a familiar place that will become my place as well. Since I never had a strong vision of what my wedding would be and since my family is so small, I was able to be flexible and see the practical and sentimental value of having it there. Once we decided this, we gained a clearer vision of what it would be like and how to plan for it. It all just kind of fell into place with that one decision.”

The most important item to take into consideration in terms of your relationship when developing your action plan is the implementation of the partnership model (Step Three) upon which you two have agreed. Using your list of tasks, begin to assign responsibilities to each other, assignments that reflect the selected model. Set dates and times for discussion of these items or (if you’ve selected a different model), set agreements about when you will provide your partner with feedback and deadlines for decisions. Write down everything that you have done, that you need to do and have decided you will do so that you can keep a record of your progress.

Ava described the way she and Shane implemented their action plan based on the egalitarian model. “We did end up separating who would do what research and then we would bring each other in when it came time to make a decision. For example, Shane was in charge of the bartending, music, videography and wedding insurance only because he already knows that stuff. Some of the bigger items like the location and catering we did together because they were more important and we both wanted to be involved.”

If to this point you’ve followed all four steps, you should be on the road not only to a successful wedding, but to a healthy and successful marriage.

Stay Connected: Using Communication, Conflict Resolution and Intimacy SkillsEngaged couples also tend to overlook or take for granted this step—that is until a problem arises and demands their attention. We urge couples to stay connected by using specific relationship skills while they are planning their wedding. Just taking to heart the message in this article may give you a better perspective as to your purpose. Remember, your wedding is about you and your relationship and what happens between the two of you on an emotional level. Practicing good relationship skills with keeps you focused on that perspective.

We all know that in planning an event as complicated as a wedding we can lose sight of the big picture, but staying aware of three skills should help You to keep that vision in place. These are:

communication

conflict resolution

intimacy

By keeping an eye on how you are doing in each of these three areas, you will be inoculated against high conflict interactions, those that can, ultimately, undermine your connection.

Take care not to let the work of planning divide you. Whatever partnership model you have selected, it is essential that you both attend to and work on the quality of the way you relate to each other. Try to be intentional about the way you communicate planning details to your partner. Be clear. Use I statements (I telephoned 47 people this morning). Listen well (when he tells you he spent more money than he hoped to on the invitations). Don’t let your feelings overwhelm your message.Allow time for your partner to think about the news you have just rendered; leave time for questions, clarification of options, voicing of preferences. Remind yourself, always, that this is a collaborative effort, no matter the model selected. Even those who have adopted an asymmetrical model must make certain to talk about the planning and feelings around the plans as they progress.

You and your partner will have differences and these differences can evolve into conflicts if you do not handle them wisely and well. Pay attention. How do you handle differences when they come up? Which differences between you tend to lead to conflicts? How do you and your partner resolve those conflicts? Who typically breaks the logjam when one of you is upset? How do you reconnect after you have argued? How well are you staying intimate with each other, emotionally as well as physically?

Ask yourselves these questions, and answer them truthfully and often. So much about conflict resolution involves managing strong feelings and avoiding escalation, staying focused on the specific issues involved, and trusting that open and clear dialogue will, eventually, lead to resolution. Being aware that flexibility and compromise are required in nearly all resolutions will also help.

For every couple planning a wedding someone at some point feels upset and understanding breaks down. For Shane and Ava understanding broke down over their different styles of decision-making.

“The first clash we had was over the photographer,” Tine told us. “I had seen their portfolio and knew them from work so I was ready to sign the contract. I make decisions very quickly. But Shane takes so much longer to decide. He wanted to read it over and then talk it over with our friend who was also a photographer. Then Shane wanted to research different packages and options. Shane was the first to notice our differences in decision-making because I was too busy with everything to even notice that our process was breaking down.”

Shane continued. “It began with an awareness that Ava was pushing me to make a decision before I was ready. So I asked what was going on? So we finally tossed the issue out for discussion one night. We were a little defensive at first. I think we were trying to justify the positions we had taken. I was saying my way was the right way to make decisions.”

Ava followed up. ”Ultimately I figured out that the right call was to give him more time in order for him to feel comfortable. I came to accept that I wasn’t going to change his mind on his style. But if I felt he was taking too much time making up his mind, I could tell him that.

“One thing I learned that helped,” Shane confided, “was to tell Ava when I would have a decision and then stick by that promise. I might have to reassure her that I would do everything myself in order to make that decision by the date I agreed to. But we also had an understanding that if we were going to lose a vendor because of my timeline, I would be willing to speed up my process to fit the practical realities.

It certainly helps to talk about it,” Ava agreed. “because what I really wanted was to know that we were making progress. Shane’s process seems very internal to me and I didn’t see that any work was getting done. And that made me nervous.”

Married and family life will always present challenges that call upon you and your spouse to come together and resolve the issue. To do this you must be clear, respectful and collaborative, and if you practice good relationship skills as you plan your wedding, you’ll find that good communication is easier in future endeavors.

Stay Centered: The Keys to Stress ManagementOne problem nearly every engaged couple we know has encountered is the sense of feeling overwhelmed, frustrated or just plain confused while planning a wedding. One person may begin to feel burned out and resentful of all the work involved, and that’s not surprising given the many issues involved. But the real question to ask yourselves is how you are going to cope with all the work and pressure? How are you going to draw on your resources–and those of your partner–to make the process more manageable? How do you take care of yourself so that planning for the best day of your life doesn’t end up making you feel more miserable than you’ve ever felt?

We strongly encourage couples–and especially those individuals who have agreed to take on the lion’s share of the planning–to devise a stress management plan. Exercise, support from friends and family, realistic expectations and letting perfectionist standards go commonly help to relieve stress during the most challenging times. Be patient with yourself, your partner and the process, and that too will help to take the edge off.

But sometimes patience, friends, exercise and reality don’t resolve the problem. Consider taking some time off. Try one week on, one week off, or call a wedding time-out on select weekends when you and your fiance just spend time together. When wedding planning begins to feel like a grind, instead of grinding through it, give yourself that needed break.

Shane and Ava had a unique way of relieving stress–SKYDIVING!

As Shane described it, “Our best stress management strategy was to go skydiving since we both like to do that. The thing about skydiving is that you can’t do it safely while thinking about something else, like wedding planning. We would just say ‘we need a break, let’s go to the drop zone’. After a day of skydiving, everything else can be viewed with more perspective.”

Not everyone is a skydiver, but everyone knows that some things help to take their minds off the tough stuff. Now and then you’ll want to follow your bliss.

The big risk for those who don’t take breaks is that you may project your stress onto your relationship and create conflict where there need be none. Be careful about this dynamic. Try not to let the stress build. Find a way to talk about your tension, upset, angst as soon as you notice tension levels rising. Talk about why whatever you’re doing is frustrating you rather than complaining or blaming your partner. If you have followed our seven steps, you’ll have fewer resentments and disappointments, and making sure you follow through on agreements will always help to eliminate feelings of hurt, anger or disappointment.

Finally, we strongly recommend that you complete most of your wedding planning at least three months before The Big Day. The purpose of all the planning is to allow you to enjoy the experience. This means you’ll want to shift from the operational side to the experience of the wedding itself. That switch may take some time, so give yourself that time. Ideally, when The Big Day arrives, you’ll be ready to let all the details go and all that good planning will deliver the day as expected.

Take a Marriage Preparation ClassConsidering the emphasis we place on partnering while planning your wedding, our recommendation that you take a skill-based marriage preparation class should not be surprising. Implementing the ideas in this article may be sufficient, of course, and we think reading this is a good start.

We also know that every couple can benefit from learning advanced relationship skills and strategies identified in marital research; learning these skills has made an enormous difference for thousands of young couples. We hope this article will help you to devise a framework for wedding planning but we know it cannot teach you all the skills you’ll need to have not only a marvelous wedding, but also a wonderful and enduring marriage.

We recommend that you take a course early in your engagement; this will enable you to implement the tools and strategies you learn in your wedding planning. Since wedding planning can reveal so many unexpressed expectations, unacknowledged preferences and so many differences in style, particular skills are required to help you meet the challenges. Our skill-based workshop in San Francisco is designed to make sure everyone learns these skills.

As Ava explained, some of the skills she learned in Marriage Prep 101 helped her to ease the friction that arose while she and Shane were making decisions. “One technique we learned that has been really helpful is to consider the type of feedback that Shane was looking for when he brought up an issue. Rather than just telling him what I wanted him to hear, I learned to listen more closely and to consider the kind of response he was wanting from me. When I wasn’t sure, I would ask him. Sometimes he just wanted me to listen and not tell him what he should have done differently.”

The latest marital research suggests that taking a marriage preparation workshop–especially one that emphasizes relationship skills–can reduce the chances of a couple divorcing by 30%! In this age, when divorce seems, sometimes, as chancy as a coin toss, marriage education makes great sense. But marriage preparation is not just about divorce prevention. Most people hope to have the best marriage possible, now and for the long-term. Learning how to “do marriage” makes sense. Just as many of you took driver’s education classes before you took the wheel, just as others take labor and delivery classes before giving birth, taking a marriage course before marriage can help you to be well-prepared and, as a result, happier.

We want couples to know that the best marriages are, forever, works in progress. If you hope to get the return you’re seeking, you’ll want to invest in your marriage. Everyone wants a world-class marriage, but we challenge you to work to create the marriage of your dreams.

A variety of religious and secular workshops, classes and services are available for newly engaged and newlywed couples. Ask your priest, rabbi or reverend about those services offered through your church or temple. You can also visit the Smart Marriages website at www.smartmarriages.com and click on their directory for a list of programs available in your area.

Advice For the Bride

Listen! Listen! Listen! Give your fiancé a chance to articulate what he thinks and feels about the wedding and planning process.

Accept that your fiancé may have a different level of investment in the wedding and wedding planning process

When things go wrong with the planning, be careful not to take your frustrations out on your fiancé. Be thoughtful and respectful of your partner’s point of view, even when it differs from yours.

View it equally as a process of collaboration, learning and partnership as much as an outcome that will create a wonderful event.

Advice For The Groom

Listen! Listen! Listen! Give your fiancé a chance to articulate what she thinks and feels about the wedding and planning process.

Respect your fiance’s emotional investment in the wedding, even if it seems a bit “over the top”.

Try to match her emotionality around the ups and downs of the planning process with a reasoned, assured stance that brings some perspective to the task.

Look for ways to be involved and helpful in the planning that is consistent with what you agreed to be accountable for. Speak up if you are uncomfortable with some decision or if you feel left out of the planning.

Look for ways to build consensus with your partner rather than focusing too much on the differences between you.

RELATIONSHIP STRESS TEST

Instructions: Each member of the couple takes the questionnaire separately without revealing their answers. Try to answer honestly and objectively. Make sure you answer all the questions.

Answer Key:

1=Never 2=Rarely 3=Sometimes 4=Often 5=Always

1._____ I feel overwhelmed by all the tasks involved in planning my wedding.

2._____ I have difficulty communicating with my fiancé about all the wedding decisions.

3._____ I am disappointed my fiancé doesn’t help out more.

4._____ When my fiancé and I differ on what we want in the wedding, I feel tense and frustrated.

5._____ My fiancé and I have some different ideas about the way the wedding should be.

6._____ I am not sure how much input I want from my fiancé on wedding planning.

7._____ I feel torn between my family’s preferences for the wedding and my fiance’s.

8._____ I take my stress about wedding planning out on my fiancé.

9._____ At times, I feel the wedding planning has come between my fiancé and I.

10._____My fiancé and I have different ideas about the financial aspects of the wedding.

Scoring:

Add up the numbers for all of your answers. Use the scoring key below to assess the impact of wedding planning on your relationship.